Boards spend a lot of time on financial governance, regulation and compliance and the board along with the auditors; ensure that the accountability structures and processes are in place throughout the organisation to deliver accurate and reliable financial information to the shareholders and stakeholders.

The question is, 'why do we treat IT any differently?'. It would be reasonable to assume that we could have processes and accountabilities in place for the accurate and reliable delivery of IT projects and ongoing operations that can be are easily monitored and audited.

As an asset class, IT is new territory for boards – finance is an age old profession and we can apply many of its disciplines to establish good IT governance practices.

IT governance often gets confused with IT management and the CIO gets to be accountable for anything that has the word IT attached to it. As a consequence the business ends up being interested onlookers and expert critics, rather than accountable participants in any business process pertaining to IT.